


Not A Tame Daughter of Eve

by polkadot



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: After the Happy Ending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bittersweet, Canon Temporary Character Death, F/F, F/M, Fridge Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-18 15:49:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8167460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polkadot/pseuds/polkadot
Summary: Sometimes, long after sunset, Susan would crawl in bed with Lucy and snuggle close. Her tears made the pillow damp, and the bed was only meant for one; but Lucy was small in this world, and they fit. Lucy did not cry, because she did not see that crying would help.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [a_la_grecque](https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_la_grecque/gifts).



Some nights Susan cried.

Lucy pretended to be asleep. Susan would have been embarrassed if she had known Lucy lay awake, watching the flicker of the streetlamp outside their window, listening to the stifled sobs and wishing she could do something, anything, to help. 

In Narnia they had shared a bedroom suite, with their own bedrooms off a sitting room. Lucy had liked it; when she was little she had often padded in her nightgown and stocking feet into Susan’s room, and Susan would give her hot cocoa and tell her a bedtime story. Sometimes Lucy would fall asleep, and wake in the middle of the night to find herself tucked underneath the covers, Susan asleep next to her. 

When they were older, they would come upstairs from a state dinner, their hair askew from dancing with badgers and centaurs and international diplomats, and collapse laughing into the big comfortable chairs in the sitting room. They’d talk for hours, and finally stumble drowsily off to bed as the sun peeped up over the horizon. 

Then there was Aravis, and Susan had moved out of their suite. Lucy had missed her, but they had still been close. As women, the age gap had mattered less than it had as children; if Susan still occasionally lapsed into patronizing, she had been quick to apologize if Lucy pointed it out. They were Queens, and not just in name – together they had ruled Narnia.

In Narnia, Susan had not been a gawky half-grown girl. She had ruled while Lucy and the boys were off gallivanting on adventures, her life’s aim and heart’s desire to help her subjects and ease the hardships of their lives. Perhaps it had something to do with growing up in a country at war, or perhaps it was something innate in Susan; but whatever the reason for Susan’s advocacy, when Susan’s subjects had called her the most beautiful woman in the world they had not been merely making an aesthetic judgment. Her love for her kingdom had shone through her, and her gentle kindness had gained her its love in return.

Lucy had fought with her sometimes, as sisters do. They both liked to be right, and they both had tempers; Susan’s quiet anger had been no less real than Lucy’s fiery hotheadedness. But there was no one Lucy respected more, and they had forged a relationship that was close, loyal, and true. Together they had shed their girlhood for womanhood, and together they had become Queens of Narnia in more than name. If there was anything Lucy knew, even as some of the details of their life in Narnia began to slip agonizingly away from her, it was that they were no figurehead Queens. They ruled.

But now Lucy was nine again, and Susan cried at night.

Sometimes, long after sunset, Susan would crawl in bed with Lucy and snuggle close. Her tears made the pillow damp, and the bed was only meant for one; but Lucy was small in this world, and they fit. 

Lucy did not cry, because she did not see that crying would help.

~

“Come outside, Lu,” Edmund said, wheedlingly.

Lucy smiled and waved at him. “Maybe later.”

Susan had walked to the village, as she often did these days. She had friends there. Mrs. Macready observed darkly that she could be up to anything, and that girls these days had no respect for their elders, but the Professor let her go. Perhaps he saw the fragility in the way she held her head; perhaps he somehow guessed what it might be like, to lose Narnia.

Meanwhile the boys played outside, fighting battles with sticks and recreating old campaigns. Lucy joined them sometimes, but often all she wanted was to come upstairs and be alone with her thoughts. She had never been a quiet girl; but now she found that she liked the silence.

She sat with her back against the wardrobe and lost herself in daydreams. It was only a wardrobe now, nothing more, but still she fancied she could hear the faint echoes of Narnian songs. It was a comfort to have it near.

One day she walked with Susan to the village, and used all the pocket money she’d saved to buy a beautiful fat notebook. Susan did not ask why she wanted it; but a week later there was a box of pencils on Lucy’s pillow, with all the colors of the rainbow.

Lucy’s handwriting had reverted to the weak and childish hand she remembered from her childhood, but as time went on it began to resemble more and more the elegant lines it had later become. So too did her drawing skill improve; and so she sat by the wardrobe every afternoon and put down their stories. Mr. Tumnus came to life by her hand, in word and sketch, and then the Badgers, and then Aravis. 

She would not forget them, she promised herself. Even as her memories began to blur at the edges, trying to become more dreamlike by the day, she kept them as sharp as she could. Her entire world had been ripped from her; she clutched at it with both hands and tried to keep it safe, though no written or sketched page could ever truly capture Narnia.

~

Returning to Narnia was at first an adventure. They waded in the water and walked barefoot across the sand, and Lucy laughed along with the boys’ high spirits, watching Susan’s glow. Nobody wanted to be the first to say it, but Lucy knew they were all thinking the same thing: let them find somewhere inhabited, and they would be back in Cair Paravel in no time at all. Back with their friends, their loved ones, the wonky handle on the door of the library, the kitchen table on which Edmund had carved his initials – back home. 

(Lucy had accepted within months of returning to England that it would never be home to her. She had left England when she was eight, and grown up in Narnia; Narnia would forever be her true home, its songs and stories marching in her bones.)

Susan avoided the subject along with the rest of them, but Lucy saw the way her eyes shone.

“It might be anywhere,” Peter said, when they had been walking some time.

It might. Perhaps they had fallen into Calormen, and the journey to Cair Paravel would be long and tiring. Perhaps they had fallen into another world entirely – if there were two worlds, there might surely be more – and their communal joy must shortly be shattered. 

But Lucy knew that this was Narnia. Her bones told her. 

She didn’t answer Peter, but she took Susan’s hand and squeezed it. Susan smiled at her, and it wasn’t the affectionate smile of an older sister, but that of her comrade-in-arms.

They had been gone a year. Lucy could already hear the beat of the dance music that would play at the celebration to mark their return; they would invite the Archenlanders, she thought, even if Cor did tease Aravis something wicked every time he visited. She would ask Mrs. Beaver to make her favorite apple pie, and she would laugh at the consternation of all the Princes who had paid her court, to see her nine again, and not the beautiful golden-haired Queen they remembered. (Lucy had never intended to be a heartbreaker, but she had not yet found the man to make her own heart beat faster. Susan had said it would come in time, and perhaps when Lucy least expected it; and if there had been perhaps a hint of smugness about her, it had been softened by the quiet happiness in her eyes.)

And after the celebrations were over – they would last at least a week, if not a month, as their friends from all over Narnia (and beyond) made the journey to Cair Paravel to welcome them home – Lucy decided she wanted to go traveling. She would visit all the places she loved, and this time she would not take anything for granted, because she knew how quickly it could all be taken away.

(Lucy loved her parents. But she had lost them once, and lived fifteen years without them; she had grown from a child into a woman, and lived two-thirds of her life in Narnia. If it was a choice between England, which had her parents, and Narnia, which had everything and everyone else that she loved, there was no choice. Perhaps that was wrong; but it was how Lucy felt.) 

She would write herself a note and put it on her door, so that even if the Narnian air made England slip out of her memories, as it had the first time, she would know never to ride in the Western Woods, for fear of finding the lamppost again.

~

It was Narnia. 

But it was not _their_ Narnia.

That first night they curled together for warmth by the fire, in the forsaken ruins of Cair Paravel. The boys, who had insisted on being on the ends out of some protective impulse – although this island seemed entirely deserted, Lucy had observed tartly – fell asleep quickly, and it was soon clear that Peter hadn’t lost his unfortunate tendency to snore.

To the boys it was an adventure. They were hungry and tired, and a little sorry that their friends would not be arriving shortly to welcome them; but they were excited about the unknown, already wondering why Aslan had brought them to this time. Sleep came easy to them, even on the hard ground, with the morning ahead to look forward to.

Lucy held Susan in her arms and let her sob on her shoulder, little gasping breaths that she tried to stifle. 

Aravis was dead. Mr. Tumnus was dead. Mr. and Mrs. Beaver were dead. Cor and Corin were dead. Everyone they had ever known was dead.

Except Aslan, she supposed. But right then, with Susan weeping as if her heart had broken, Lucy felt as if she could shriek at him, shout and yell and swear with all the colorful curses she had learned from sailors in the Lone Islands.

This wasn’t their world. It would have been better if he’d left them in England; Susan’s heart would have mended, in time, and Lucy might even have grown to feel at home. But to raise their hopes, to bring them back to Narnia, only to cruelly dash all their dreams – that was too much. Lucy loved Aslan fiercely, but right at that moment she wanted to scream.

“I’m sorry, Su,” she whispered, and held her tighter, as Peter snored and the familiar Narnian constellations unfolded overhead.

~

They had an adventure. They saved Narnia from a usurper, and placed a King on the throne who would try to rule well and restore Narnia to peace and justice. On the whole, Lucy thought Caspian had a good chance; he was inexperienced and tentative, but so had they been at the beginning, and their rule had developed into the Golden Age of Narnia.

Susan, wan and pale, said little on their journey. Her eyes were huge and smudged with shadow, but she hiked grimly on. 

There was little for either Susan or Lucy to do here in Narnia. It was the boys that the new Narnians looked to, the boys who planned strategy and fought duels with Miraz; and though Aslan still called to them all, and Lucy ran to him like old times, she watched the way Susan hung back, and felt the sharp anger in her heart. Aslan could have warned them about the lamppost in the wood. He could have brought them back. He could have let Susan through the wardrobe, the first or hundredth or thousandth time she flung herself against its back wall.

Susan rode with Lucy on Aslan’s back, the day they destroyed the Bridge of Beruna. She rode quietly, and Lucy heard her own shrieks of joy go unechoed.

And then it was over, and Aslan was sending them back to England.

At least this time they knew what was happening. At least this time they went into it with their eyes open, aware what they were leaving behind. Lucy wasn’t sure they had a choice; and even if they did – even if she could have fought Aslan’s will and refused to go – she wasn’t ready to watch the others walk out of her life, leaving her alone in a Narnia that was at once achingly familiar and startlingly foreign.

(If this had been _their_ Narnia…but then she would not have been staying alone.)

Aslan intended for her and Edmund to return to Narnia one day, according to Peter, and this too was new. Last time they had feared that it was gone forever. Knowing that she would return gave Lucy the strength to take Susan’s hand and move toward the Door, ready to become once again little Lucy Pevensie, one-time Queen of Narnia.

Peter and Susan were leaving Narnia forever. Too old, Aslan said. Too old. 

Lucy wondered if it was really that Aslan saw the pain in Susan’s eyes, and felt it as a judgment.

She took a last look behind her, memorizing the scene. “Su,” she whispered, tugging on Susan’s hand.

Susan shook her head, her eyes fixed firmly forward. “I can’t,” she said, and walked unfalteringly through the Door.

~

The boys said Susan had forsaken Narnia. 

They said she cared more about film stars and lipstick, about giggling with her girlfriends and becoming an incorrigible flirt. Peter looked stern and Edmund looked disappointed; whenever they brought up Narnia, and Susan primmed up her mouth and said “Aren’t we too old for that fairy story?”, Lucy wanted to slide down in her chair, slip under the table and hide, before Peter started lecturing and Edmund started reasoning and Susan went in their room and slammed the door.

Lucy tried to talk to the boys sometimes, but she was nine years old. Nine-year-olds are voiceless. And she didn’t want to talk about Susan’s pain, the raw wound that throbbed at the center of Susan’s gay frivolity.

She wondered how the boys could have forgotten so quickly, how they could be so blind. In Narnia they had fought wars, conducted diplomacy, led a kingdom; now they sat together, two weedy adolescents, and reminisced endlessly about the good old days, as if it had been one big adventure, or a cinema thriller.

Her brothers were not cruel, and they meant well, but they were blind. In England they were still young princes, their maturity lauded and their potential praised. When they were older they would rule the world again; in ties and suits instead of on horseback, but these things were only costumes. The power they wielded in Narnia had been paused, not halted.

Lucy had no such assurance. One day she had been a full-grown woman, free and assured and independent, a reigning Queen; the next she was a powerless nine-year-old.

And Susan. Oh, Susan.

The boys said she had forgotten. The boys judged her, tried to reason to her, tried to explain to her like she was weak, seduced by the easy glitter of celebrity and gossip and ephemera. They meant only to include her in their reminisces, to share the magic of their adventures – they meant well. And yet they slipped, unconsciously, back into England’s reality, where men were the rulers and women were to be protected, cajoled, guided. They tried to make her remember, and they sighed when she ran away.

Lucy remembered the steadiness of Susan’s hands as she presided over complicated judicial disputes; the exhaustion in her face when she stayed up two nights in a row helping the healers during an outbreak of illness; the pucker between her brows as she balanced the kingdom’s finances; the soft light in her eyes whenever Aravis smiled at her.

Neither of the boys ever mentioned Aravis. Perhaps it was the English air, which every day made Narnia seem more like a dream, blurring the lines of her memories. Or perhaps Aslan had made them forget; he was so intent on having their love and their faith in him, and Lucy was nearly sure that he’d lost Susan’s. Perhaps he feared that if the boys remembered everything, he would lose theirs as well.

That didn’t explain how Lucy remembered. But then, she refused to forget.

At boarding school, she learned how to be an English girl, how to blend in and copy the others. This was no free Narnia; there were so many rules, and she never seemed to be able to stop breaking them. But in time she broke fewer, as the ordered existence of their lives began to fall into a comprehensible rhythm. She made friends, and established a reputation for being a bit wild, and not a great scholar, but fundamentally sound. 

She could feel her Narnianness begin to slip away.

Every night, as the other girls at her school chattered and gossiped, Lucy filled the pages of her notebook with more tales of everyone she had loved so dearly. Sitting alone, she captured the memories in cold black-and-white, beyond the ability of England’s air to blur them. 

And yet there were some things that defied her ability to capture, that seemed so plain and unremarkable on the page. There was something of Narnia that could not coexist with England, except within the divided loyalty of Lucy’s heart.

Sometimes she sat silent, her pen poised motionless, lost in thought.

~

“If he had given us a choice,” she asked Susan at Christmas, “would you have stayed?”

Susan had not spoken of Narnia since they returned, and Lucy hated to ask; she was not Peter or Edmund, almost angry at what they saw as a betrayal. But it was important.

Susan didn’t answer. She was standing by the window, gazing out. If Lucy had learned how to pretend to be English while at school, Susan looked like she had too; she was funny and bright and pretty, and she made everyone laugh. 

“Not the second time,” Susan said, almost inaudibly.

Lucy started to ask about the first time, but the look on Susan’s face stopped her.

~

Lucy was bruised, blue, and bedraggled, but she was standing on the deck of Caspian’s ship, and if she was not properly in Narnia, it was close enough. 

She had left her notebooks in her bedroom in England with a note for Su, just in case Aslan called them to Narnia while Su was in America and Edmund and Lucy were at Uncle Harold and Aunt Alberta’s for the summer. She had suspected that he would; Edmund was nearly as old as Susan had been when Aslan declared her ‘too old,’ so if Aslan meant to bring them back he was running out of time.

(Lucy had not let herself think about the possibility that Aslan would decide against having them return at all.)

She hoped Susan read them, when she was ready.

She thought Susan might be the only one who would understand.

~

After they had found the seven lost lords of Narnia – after they had escaped slavery on the Lone Islands, freed Eustace from dragonhood, visited Burnt Island and Deathwater Island and Duffers’ Island and the Dark Island, met a fallen star, and sailed to the end of the world – Aslan came to Caspian, and told him that Edmund and Lucy and Eustace were to return to England.

Lucy wondered if Aslan didn’t come to tell them himself because he knew her mind; he had always seemed to know what she was thinking. 

“I’m not going,” she told Edmund, sitting cross-legged on the deck. 

He stared at her, his brows drawn down. “What?”

Lucy watched Eustace talking to Reepicheep, Caspian standing nearby with a smile on his face. She saw the wide sweep of the Narnian sky, felt the sea breeze on her skin. “I’m not going back to England, Ed.”

“You have to,” he said, sounding more bewildered than upset. “Aslan said…”

“The Telmarines stayed. There’s no reason I can’t.”

She hadn’t been ready last time. She hadn’t been ready to defy Aslan, say goodbye to her family, and stay alone in the world she loved so much. 

She was ready now.

Edmund brought Caspian to talk sense into her. He dropped down by her side, looking quizzical. 

“I won’t threaten your reign or try to claim my crown again,” Lucy said, meeting his gaze calmly and straight-on. She felt suddenly like Susan, gentle and capable, instead of the laughing scapegrace she had always been. The surety in her bones drove her on. “I’ll be a quiet, anonymous Narnian.”

Caspian smiled at that. He had a nice smile, warm and friendly. “I don’t think you could ever be a quiet anonymous Narnian.” 

“Well,” Lucy said, feeling the corners of her mouth turn up, “I intend to try.”

“You belong to your world,” Caspian said. “Your brother is afraid to lose you.”

Lucy did not want to lose Edmund, and Peter, and Susan. But she had lost Narnia twice now, and she was determined not to lose it a third time. She would not risk being told that she was too old to return, as if age should matter when it was her world at stake. She would not be denied because she was a girl, or because she was young (although she had lived nearly thirty years, for all that she still looked ten), or because Aslan felt betrayed by Susan turning her back on him.

“I belong to Narnia,” she said, trying to will him to understand. (Though it did not matter if he understood; she was not asking his permission.) “ _This_ is my world.”

He sat with her in silence for a few minutes. She could see the thoughts chase across his face.

Lucy remembered that he had always treated them all with full respect, even though she had been a small girl with a dirty face, and not the laughing golden-haired Queen of lore. She hoped that he would respect her choice; she did not need an ally to help her face Aslan – she was not afraid of him, and she did not need protecting – but she would like a friend, in the years to come.

“You will not go with Edmund and Eustace and Reepicheep to the End of the World?” he asked, finally.

She shook her head. She did not trust that Aslan would not spirit her away, if she left the ship and all these witnesses. 

(He could of course do it here, if he wanted. Lucy did not doubt it. But she thought he would not.)

“Then you had best come to my quarters and see if the gold lion’s head speaks to you,” Caspian said. He got to his feet, and extended a hand to her.

Lucy accepted it, and felt almost her old self again. 

~

Caspian left her alone with the lion’s head. Lucy thought he would have stayed if she asked; but this was something she had to do alone.

“Aslan,” she said, and the lion’s head woke. 

“You cannot do this, little one,” it said, and Aslan’s voice was stern.

And oh, this was the hard part, for Lucy loved him so. She had since she was a little girl; but for all that Aslan still called her ‘child’ and ‘little one,’ she had not been either for a long time. She could not blindly follow him in pure faith, even though she loved him. 

Susan no longer loved him, Lucy thought. Perhaps she even hated him; or perhaps she felt only a numb emptiness, the absence of love or hate, as she tried desperately to forget. 

Lucy still loved him. But she was Queen Lucy the Valiant, and she would face even Aslan if she must.

“Daughters of Eve have stayed in Narnia before,” she said, quietly. “This is my home, Aslan.”

His voice was deep and disappointed. “You belong in England, my child.”

Lucy stood tall. “To the boys, Narnia means adventure. They are sorry to leave it; but England is their home. To Susan, Narnia means only sadness. She is lost to Narnia, at least for now.”

She had thought about what she would say, on many a sleepless night at school. It was easier than she had expected; perhaps the first step was the hardest. “I am different. This is my _home_. You gave the Telmarines a choice – to stay or to return. So I make my choice. I stay.”

He was watching her, the golden eyes of the lion’s head unnervingly piercing. 

“I am not a child,” Lucy said. “I will love you all the days of my life, Aslan; but I will do so as a Narnian.”

She clasped her hands behind her back, lifted her chin, and waited. 

For all her brave words, she still half-expected to find herself falling through the air, back into England, forever barred from Narnia. Aslan was not a tame Lion; to be defied by his little Lucy might anger him. 

But Lucy was not a tame Daughter of Eve, and she had to try.

It was very quiet in Caspian’s quarters. Somewhere above her, she could hear Eustace talking, and hear the creak of the ship, as it swayed slightly in the wind.

“They will miss you, Lucy,” Aslan said.

“I know,” Lucy said, and she did. It was what had kept her up nights at school. It was the only reason she had hesitated, the only thing that had made her question her resolve. 

She hoped they would forgive her, in time.

~

Caspian had a few sheets of parchment put away in case it had been needed, and he offered it to Lucy wordlessly, along with a quill. She spent an hour alone in Caspian’s quarters, writing to Peter and Susan; she wished she had been able to say goodbye.

Then she took a few deep, cleansing breaths, and went on deck to give the letter to Edmund.

They all cried at the last, even Eustace.

She didn’t know how Edmund would explain her disappearance, back in England. She didn’t want their parents to suffer, wondering for years what had happened to her. Perhaps Aslan would be able to make it right; perhaps he could make her memory fade from their minds, as he had made England fade from hers during their first life in Narnia. She hoped so.

Even if he couldn’t – or wouldn’t – she would not be turned from her purpose. 

Lucy watched the boat that carried Edmund, Eustace, and Reepicheep until it was out of sight, the sun glinting in her eyes.

Then she turned to Caspian, feeling suddenly shy.

He smiled, and she smiled back.

“Shall we go home?” he asked.

“Yes,” Lucy said. “Yes.”

~

Caspian had never looked quite as tentative as he did now, holding his baby daughter cradled in his arms. Lucy, exhausted yet triumphant, watched them with a sleepy joy.

"She's so tiny," he said, his voice a whisper.

"She's large enough," Lucy said, though her voice failed to achieve the level of tartness she'd intended. She'd been wounded in battle before, but nothing had prepared her for childbirth. (Though it had all been worth it when the midwife, a cheery Dwarf with a soothingly calm bedside manner, had placed her daughter on her chest.)

"What shall we name her?" Caspian asked, stroking a reverent finger down the baby's downy cheek.

It had been ten years since she had refused to leave Narnia; and while Lucy had never regretted her choice, she had missed her family every day. 

Now she had her own small family, and the ache in her heart eased a little. 

She smiled at her husband and her daughter. "Susan," she said, reaching out her hand to rest it on Caspian's knee. "Susan."

~

_epilogue_

It has been eighty years since Susan Pevensie left Narnia, never to return.

Now, as she takes her first steps into the Narnia that is part of Aslan’s Country, she blinks back the tears that spring to her eyes, for it is just as she remembers.

(She never forgot. How could she?)

There’s a girl standing on the hill, waiting for her; and as Susan sees her, she breaks into a run. And she _can_ run, because she is no longer ninety-three, with a double hip replacement, but twenty-three, the age she was when she first learned what it was to fall in love. 

She runs up the hill, nearly tripping over her feet in her haste.

“You came,” Lucy says, holding her close as she sobs on Lucy’s shoulder, overwhelmed.

“Of course I came,” Susan says, when she can make her words work again.

When she died, surrounded by her family and friends, she passed into the England that was part of Aslan’s Country. She was reunited with her wife Jane, six years gone, and her daughter Tracey, and her parents. England is her home, and that will never change; but as soon as she could, she came to Narnia. To Edmund and Peter, gone seventy-two long years; to Lucy, gone seventy-nine; to Aravis, gone eighty-one.

“I knew you would,” Lucy says, tucking a wayward lock of hair behind Susan’s ear. “You’ve just been _so long_.”

Susan laughs. It’s a little watery, but it’s a laugh nonetheless, and Lucy hugs her again, as impulsive as ever. 

“Come on,” Lucy says, slipping her arm through Susan’s. “They’re all waiting for us.”

Susan’s heart is so full, and there are no shadows left.

Arm in arm, the two Queens of Narnia walk into their forever.


End file.
